APARTMENT, THE [1960]

SYNOPSIS:
CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is a bright young insurance clerk working
for a large firm in New York. Anxious to get ahead, Baxter agrees
to let his boss J.D. Sheldrake and a number of other senior
executives use his conveniently located apartment as a place to
meet their mistresses. As Baxter finds himself rising in the
corporate hierarchy, he considers asking the building's
attractive elevator operator, Fran Kubelik (Shirley Maclaine) out
on a date, not realising that she is the woman Sheldrake is
having an affair with.

Billy Wilder co-wrote and directed The Apartment in 1960, right
after he did the even better-known Some Like It Hot. It's hard to
think of anyone currently working in Hollywood who could remotely
match his achievement in making these two contrasting but equally
brilliant comedies back to back. Jack Lemmon, who stars in both,
was also at his peak, a fascinating actor capable of combining
traditional physical comedy with a modern sense of performance as
neurosis. Lemmon throws himself into the role of Baxter to the
point where he can be hard to watch - there's something repulsive
in the character's abject eagerness to please, as he banters
cheerfully with his fellow employees and cringes to his sleazy
boss (a superb performance by Fred MacMurray). Psychoanalytic
concepts are rarely far from the surface in Hollywood comedies of
this era, and Baxter (like many characters played by Lemmon) is
essentially a victim of castration. Made to appear less than a
man by MacMurray and the other executives who serve as a chorus
of father figures, he takes on a self-abasingly feminine role: in
allowing strangers to use his private space for sex, he's less a
pimp than a barely metaphorical prostitute. Films satirising the
corporate rat race were also common in the Hollywood of the 50s
and early 60s, but Wilder cuts closer to the bone than most. With
stars like Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine who can manage both comedy
and drama, he doesn't shy away from the queasy aspects of the
theme: the plot develops slowly and the style is restrained, even
drab. A master of script construction, Wilder is always a total
professional, sometimes a bit too much so. The muted happy ending
doesn't quite convince, and the slick dialogue is sometimes
obtrusive - you sense the finicky care Wilder and his co-writer I.A.L.
Diamond put into establishing minor plot points and running gags.
With its somewhat edgy subject matter, the film would seem to
defy the Hollywood conventions of its time; in fact it relies on
these conventions and uses them with great skill, while hinting
at realities that can't quite be contained within a work of
entertainment.Jake Wilson